Bad job market for college graduates in Minnesota.

Here's an interesting story on the state of the economy in Minnesota.

It points out the job market is very poor for young people.  60 percent of kids who graduated in 2011 with college degrees don't have full time jobs today.

I suspect the dramatic increase of the minimum wage in Minnesota will only the make the situation worse, particularly for non-college graduates. 

"Mozilla's Intolerance"

The CEO of Mozilla Brendan Eich was forced to resign from his position because he, get this, supported man, woman marriage.  Yes, for this act of "intolerance" he was forced out of his CEO position.  The Wall Street Journal has a good opinion piece on it as does Powerline blog.

Another example of the rising attacks on people's religious beliefs.  The land of the free is starting to look like the land of the persecuted.

A conservative professor responds to a personal attack by pointing out some of the craziness of the left.

Here's a Powerling blog post highlighting Mike Adams a conservative professor at public university in North Carolina.  A student thinks Adams should be fired because he's such an embarrassment to higher education because he believes, get this, marriage is the union of one man and one woman.  Adams has brilliant retort.  Adams asks the student who's really radical by pointing out some of the craziness which currently masquerades as academic.

It seems a student complained to Prof. Adams that he is “the biggest embarrassment to higher education in America.”  Prof. Adams’s reply to the student is reproduced here in total, so you can enjoy every splendid syllable of his smack down:

Dear Edward:

I want to take the time to thank you for writing and telling me that I should be fired from my position as a tenured professor because I am “the biggest embarrassment to higher education in America.” I also want to thank you for responding when I asked you exactly how you arrived at that conclusion. Your response, “because you insist that marriage requires one man and one woman,” was both helpful and concise.

While I respect your right to conclude that I am the biggest embarrassment to higher education in America, I think you’re wrong. In fact, I don’t even think I’m the biggest embarrassment to higher education in the state of North Carolina. But since you’re a liberal and you support “choice” – provided we’re talking about dismembering children and not school vouchers for those who weren’t dismembered – I want to give you some options. In fact, I’m going to describe the antics of ten professors, official campus groups, and invited campus speakers in North Carolina and let you decide which constitutes the biggest embarrassment to higher education.

1. In the early spring semester of 2013, a women’s studies professor and a psychology professor at Western Carolina University co-sponsored a panel on bondage and S&M. The purpose of the panel was to teach college students how to inflict pain on themselves and others for sexual pleasure. When you called me the biggest embarrassment in higher education, you must not have known about their bondage panel. Maybe you were tied up that evening and couldn’t make it.

2. At UNC Chapel Hill, there is a feminist professor who believes that women can lead happy lives without men. That’s nothing new. But what’s different is that she thinks women can form lifelong domestic partnerships with dogs and that those relationships will actually be fulfilling enough to replace marital relationships with men. I can’t make this stuff up, Ed. I don’t drop acid. Well, at least not since the late 1980s. But I promise this story is real and not an LSD flashback.

3. At Duke University, feminists hired a “sex worker” (read: prostitute) to speak as part of an event called the Sex Workers Art Show. After his speech, the male prostitute pulled down his pants, got down on his knees, and inserted a burning sparkler into his rectum. While it burned, he sang a verse of “the Star Spangled Banner.” I believe that stripping incident was almost as embarrassing as the other one involving the Duke Lacrosse team.

4. A porn star was once paid to give a speech at UNCG. The topic was “safe sodomy.” After her speech, the feminist pornographer sold autographed butt plugs to students in attendance. I’m not sure whether the ink could contribute to rectal cancer. I’m no health expert. But I do know it was pretty darned embarrassing when the media picked up on the story.

5. A few years ago at UNC-Chapel Hill, a feminist group built a large vibrator museum in the middle of the campus quad as a part of their “orgasm awareness week.” I think that was probably the climax of the semester, academically speaking. But they certainly weren’t too embarrassed to display a vibrator that was made out of wood back in the 1920s. Keep your batteries charged, Ed. We’re about halfway done.

6. A feminist administrator at UNC-Wilmington sponsored a pro-abortion event. During the event they sold tee shirts saying “I had an abortion” to students who … well, had abortions. That’s right, Ed. The students were encouraged to boast about the fact that they had killed their own children. That’s how the UNC system is preserving the future of our great Tar Heel state.

7. The following semester, that same UNCW administrator sponsored a workshop teaching students how to appreciate their orgasms. I learned art appreciation in college. Today, college kids are taught orgasm appreciation. I will let you decide whether that’s an embarrassment to higher ed., Ed.

8 A few years ago, a UNCW English professor posted nude pictures of under-aged girls as a part of an “art exhibit” in the university library. The Provost then ordered the nude pictures to be moved away from the library and into the university union. This decision was made after several pedophiles had previous been caught downloading child pornography in the university library just a few yards away from the location of the display. The English professor was incensed so she asked the Faculty Senate to censure the provost for violating her “academic freedom.” The faculty senate sided with the feminist professor. The provost was later pressured to leave the university.

9. A different feminist professor at UNCW accused a male professor of putting tear gas in her office. She was later caught putting her mail in a microwave oven. She did this because she thought people were trying to poison her with anthrax and that the oven would neutralize the toxins. She was not placed on leave for psychiatric reasons. Instead, she was designated as the university’s official “counter terrorism” expert.

10 And then there is Mike Adams. He thinks marriage is between a man and a woman.

So those are the choices, Ed. You can simply write back and tell me which of these professors, groups, or guest speakers has caused “the biggest embarrassment to higher education” – either in North Carolina or in America altogether. Or you can just concede that our system of hire education is the real embarrassment because it has been hijacked by radical feminism. And please pardon any puns – especially those that take the form of ms-spelled words.

Any person this clear-headed deserves our recognition.  Turns out he’s had to weather considerable attacks at the university for his heterodox views.  I think we’ll want to check back on his federal lawsuit against the university for its harassment.

Background checks and gun control efforts in Minnesota.

Here's an interesting analysis on gun control efforts in Minnesota and nationally along with some interesting facts on where criminals are getting their guns by John Hinderaker at Powerline.

The idea of “universal background checks” sounds appealing, and gun experts that I talk to say that improvements in the National Instant Check System can indeed be made. Such changes, however, are neither simple nor cost-free, and their effectiveness will be limited at best. The NRA recently sent an extensive letter to all members of Congress on this topic, which you can read in its entirety here. This is the executive summary:

NRA and NICS
The National Rifle Association supported the establishment of the National Criminal Instant Background Check System (NICS), and we support it to this day. At its creation, we advocated that NICS checks be accurate; fair; and truly instant. The reason for this is that 99% of those who go through NICS checks are law-abiding citizens, who are simply trying to exercise their fundamental, individual Right to Keep and Bear Arms.
Dealers
Since 1986, those engaged in the business of selling firearms for livelihood and profit have been required to have a Federal Firearms License (FFL). All retail sales of firearms currently require a NICS check, no matter where they occur. [Ed.: In other words, there is no "gun show loophole."]
Private Sales
Regarding the issue of private firearms sales, it is important to note that since 1968, it has been a federal felony for any private person to sell, trade, give, lend, rent or transfer a gun to a person he either knows or reasonably should know is not legally allowed to purchase or possess a firearm.
Mental Health Records and NICS
According to a recent General Accounting Office study, as of 2011 23 states and the District of Columbia submitted less than 100 mental health records to NICS; 17 states submitted less than ten mental health records to NICS; and four states submitted no mental health records to NICS.
Gun Shows
A common misrepresentation is that criminals obtain firearms through sales at gun shows.
A 1997 Bureau of Justice Statistics survey of state prison inmates who had used or possessed firearms in the course of their crimes found that 79 percent acquired their firearms from “street/illegal sources” or “friends or family.” Only 1.7 percent obtained firearms from anyone (dealer or non-dealer) at a gun show or flea market.
Prosecutions
In 2010, the FBI denied 72,659 NICS checks out of a total of 14,409,616. But only 62 of these cases were actually prosecuted, and only 13 resulted in a conviction.
“Universal Background Checks”
While the term “universal background checks” may sound reasonable on its face, the details of what such a system would entail reveal something quite different. A mandate for truly “universal” background checks would require every transfer, sale, purchase, trade, gift, rental, or loan of a firearm between all private individuals to be pre-approved by the federal government. In other words, it would criminalize all private firearms transfers, even between family members or friends who have known each other all of their lives.

According to a January 2013 report from the U.S. Department of Justice’s National Institute of Justice, the effectiveness of “universal background checks” depends on requiring gun registration. In other words, the only way that the government could fully enforce such a requirement would be to mandate the registration of all firearms in private possession – a requirement that has been prohibited by federal law since 1986.

Two points quickly emerge from these data. First, the federal government is doing a poor job of enforcing existing laws. Felons who try to buy guns illegally are rarely prosecuted. More important, hardly any criminals even attempt to buy guns through legal channels. Typically they either steal firearms or get them from fellow gang members or other illegal sellers. When they do obtain guns from licensed dealers, they normally have a friend–usually a young woman–buy the gun for them. Such “straw purchases” have long been illegal, but no adequate effort is made to prosecute straw purchasers. Moreover, firearms-related prosecutions have declined dramatically under Barack Obama and Eric Holder. As is so often the case, before passing new laws we should do a better job of enforcing the ones already on the books. Firearms are already heavily regulated.

Second, the background check system is largely non-functional as it relates to the mentally ill. The common element in mass shooting cases is that the shooter is nuts, by any reasonable definition, and is known to be mentally ill by any number of people, especially family members. But the mental institutions have been emptied now for several decades, and even when family members try to take their concerns to law enforcement, they generally get nowhere. One practical improvement in the NICS would be to make it easy for relatives and others to ban mentally ill people from buying firearms. A friend who is a gun dealer writes:

Legislation could require the reporting to the National Instant Check System (NICS) of individuals with known behavior problems or mental health issues that make them a danger to themselves or others. This reporting would result in a denial at the time of purchase from a dealer.

It could also institute a hot line to NICS so family members can easily report to NICS.

It would then be necessary to develop an appeal process for those who may be falsely accused by people seeking to cause them trouble.

Is Romney a closet conservative?

Here's an interesting, humorous take on Romney's comments on welfare dependency and who they vote for by John Hinderaker at Powerline.

Many conservatives have long suspected that Mitt Romney is not really one of us. I have never agreed with this assessment; instead, I think Romney is a solid conservative who doesn’t come across as a fire-breather because of his lifetime as a buttoned-down businessman. Now, Romney can thank Mother Jones for outing him for what he really is: a true conservative.

In a one-minute video clip now being touted by those hostile to Romney as a blow to his campaign, Romney points out that many Americans–he uses the shorthand number 47%, which overstates the case–have little incentive to vote for him because they don’t pay (significant) taxes and they get money from the government. So it turns out that Romney has the same opinion of Obama’s supporters that Obama does, as demonstrated by his campaign’s infamous Julia cartoons: Obama, too, thinks his supporters are a bunch of helpless dependents.

Financial crisis hitting poor and minorities hardest; indictment of liberal government policies and worldview.

The current recession brought on in part by the housing bubble has hit the poor and minorities much harder than the middle class and wealthy. That's the point made by Peter Schweizer author of the new book, "Architects of Ruin." He describes the thesis of his book for the Powerline blog.

For all the ink that has been spilled about the mortgage crisis in America, there remains a secret that almost all the major media has ignored: for all the talk of unsold condos in South Florida and McMansions sitting empty in California, the epicenter of this crisis is really in urban and minority neighborhoods....

Studies show that those hardest hit by the financial crisis are poor and minority neighborhoods. A massive study by the Boston Federal Reserve Bank looked and hundreds of thousands of mortgages and foreclosures and discovered that "in the current housing crisis foreclosures are highly concentrated in minority neighborhoods." The study notes that this is a unique phenomenon, "even relative to past foreclosure booms." The study found that those in poor and minority neighborhoods were seven times more likely to lose their homes to foreclosure that then general population.

What's the reason this housing crisis has hit minorities and poor the hardest?

This reality gives us evidence to find out who got us into this mess in the first place: housing activities and government officials who pushed for and got an aggressive affirmative-action lending program for home mortgages.

The idea sounds appealing enough: encourage homeownership in order to reduce crime, unemployment, and broken families. But activities pushed their agenda by demanding that lending institutions loosen their lending standards and look the other way when lending to people with bad credit. Activist groups such as ACORN, the Congressional Black Caucus, and the Service Employees International Union pushed banks to use "less traditional income sources such as food stamps, unemployment, part-time jobs, non-court ordered child support and foster care payments" while considering a mortgage application.

Liberal activists also pushed banks to agree "to lower down payment and closing costs" for lenders. What this meant is that the borrower would have little or no money in the game--no incentive to hang on if times got tough. The activists also pushed banks to allow people to take out larger loans on lower incomes, upending the traditional notion that people should only be allowed to have a mortgage payment account for, say, 28% of their income. Activists argued that this was all necessary in the name of social justice.

Subprime lenders such as Countrywide were all too happy to go along because it allowed them to sign even more loans that they could eventually sell to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Countrywide provided, in their own words, "zero- and low-down payment loans and underwriting guidelines that recognize diversity and cultural differences in the way minorities and immigrants may view and conduct their personal financial situations." Defaults and credit histories were now "cultural differences."

Angelo Mozilo, the CEO of Countrywide, proposed "elimination of down payment requirements for low-income and minority borrowers" to close the gap in home ownership. He wanted to look at "alternative payment histories" on loans and "properly factor in cultural differences on credit, income and spending habits." From a business proposition this made perfect sense. Countrywide was selling most of its mortgages to Fannie Mae anyway, so they wouldn't have to remain on the books. In any given year 30% of the mortgages that Fannie Mae was buying were from Countrywide.

But now that the mortgage bubble has burst, who are the activists blaming? If they once accused banks of making too few loans to minorities, now they claim they are making too many. They claim the financial crisis is a result of unscrupulous lenders giving high-interest or adjustable rate mortgages to poor applicants who didn't know what they were signing. When the rates adjusted, bam, they lost their homes. But the problem is there is little evidence to prove this. Indeed, the problem seems particularly focused on the black community.

The Boston Federal Reserve found in a study of subprime lending that blacks suffered foreclosure rates three times those of whites and Hispanics, and Hispanics twice that of whites, even when they had the same kinds of loans. Blacks tended to put less money down, had lower incomes, and had taken on more debt. They were given the loans because of the flexible underwriting rules activities and their allies in Washington had been pushing for three decades.

The Boston Fed study also found that when it came to adjustable-rate mortgages, the majority of people who lost their homes were foreclosed on before the rate was even adjusted. So it wasn't bad loans. The problem was an affirmative action lending problem that encouraged people to take out loans that they should not have.

There is also no evidence of racism in lending. A study by the New York Federal Reserve Bank looked at more than 75,000 adjustable-rate mortgages and found that minorities did not pay higher interest rates than whites. Indeed, the study concluded that "minority borrowers appear to pay slightly lower rates, as do those borrowers in zip codes with a larger percentage of black or Hispanic residents."

The real culprits here are the social activists and their allies in Washington who pushed an activist agenda. They helped to propel us into the mortgage crisis we face today.

This is a good illustration of the abuse of government power and a faulty view of human nature held by liberal politicians and activists. They thought they could use the levers of government power to create a more equitable society by government fiat rather than recognizing the importance of character and responsible conduct, e.g. living within one's means, not buying what you can't afford and so forth. The result? The ones liberals intended to help were the ones actually hurt the most.

I fear they are attempting to apply the same mindset to the health care problem. Their good intentions are misguided and will actually harm, in the long run, those they intend to help.